Wednesday, March 30, 2016

KRG
members gathered to say goodbye to Talitha Mathew, one of our
earliest members. Her husband Satish, a true friend of the Kochi
Reading Group, has put in his papers with Harrisons Malayalam and
they are returning to live in their home at Thiruvananthapuram (TVM).

Kavita
organised a dinner at the Cochin Yacht Club to say adieu – but we
hope to see them again on future occasions when they come to Kochi. Talitha is not retiring and will continue her work, though
from TVM as base.

Monday, March 21, 2016

generated purely from random noise, using a neural network trained on places by the

MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory

Bobby
Paul George who founded the Kochi Reading Group was extremely keen that we meet with Dr Panicker, who is
related to him and whom he classed as a ‘genius.’ Therefore
forsaking the India vs. Pakistan T-20 Cricket match which was to take place on the same evening,
we attended the AI talk.

Dr
Panicker’s was a rambling general talk, accessible to the
layperson; because some of the points he made were provocatively
optimistic predictions of AI, the audience interposed questions and
participated in the discussion.

Dr
Panicker has nurtured and co-founded a company with a manufacturing
base in India with ideas generated with colleagues of his at Stanford. They make swaddles for infants. Now he is stepping into new
ventures.

Dr
Panicker hails from Mavelikkara in Kerala. After the talk Bobby Paul
George, his host for the evening, arranged dinner at his home
preceded by drinks at the Yacht Club Bar. The evening was
stimulating.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

The
Lord of the Flies (LOTF), published in 1954, achieved such popularity
for the author that it became a standard book prescribed for the GCSE
in UK, and one of the KRG readers had done it for the Senior
Cambridge. Another reader of an earlier vintage had to read a vastly superior novel,Treasure
Island, for the same exam.

The
author himself thought of LOTF as a minor work of his, and while
thankful for the freedom it gave him, was not entirely welcoming of
the notoriety. He was awarded the Man Booker prize in 1980 for the
novel Rites of Passage, the
first of a trilogy of novels of the sea. And wonderful to say, the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Joe, Ammu, Shoba, Sunil

Certain
things are worth noting about this novel. The fruits the children eat
are never given their names. Palm leaves are called 'feathers,' not
in a metaphoric way; this is an unknown usage, not recorded in the OED,
which points to the author's unfamiliarity with tropical foliage. The
spectacles of Piggy, the boy suffering from myopia, are used to make
a fire by focusing the sun's rays – which is actually impossible
with the concave lenses used to correct for myopia.

The
degeneration of the children's behaviour is meant to suggest that
evil overtakes good when a system to preserve order ceases to exist.
On the evidence of this novel the impulses toward sharing
responsibility, purposeful action, orderly voicing of opinion and so
on are drowned by the thirst for bloody adventure, killing, painting
faces, ululation of battle cries, and such other blood sport.

Piggy with specs cracked

The
suggestion that the introduction of girls into the mix would have
mitigated the violence in the children's society was immediately
rejected by a woman reader who feared that it would only result in rape
being added to the crimes of bullying and murder.